Many times Sociology is charged with what it studies, we have at least a bit of knowledge about it or we have experienced it. Sometimes in our own lives or we know it through our popular wisdom. This knowledge, while sometimes accurate, is not always reliable, because it rests on commonly held beliefs rather than systematic analysis of facts. It was once considered ‘common sense’ to accept that the earth was flat. This was questioned by Pythagoras and Aristotle. Such notions still remain with us today.

For thousands of years people’s common sense told them that big objects fall faster than small ones, that stone and iron were perfectly. Solid materials, that the desire for children is instinctive in women, that with the spread of education, the institutions of caste and dowry will automatically wither away, yet today we know that none of these statement are true. These common sense statement s based on popular wisdom illustrate our point that common sense knowledge is not always true.

Some popular observations may be true but many others are not supported by empirical data. Many .common sense conclusions are based on guesses, hunches, ignorance, prejudices, mistaken interpretation and haphazard trial and error learning. Common sense can lead us astray when we are studying other societies and also when we are studying our own society. Like other scientists, sociologists do not accept something as a fact because “everyone knows it”. Instead, each piece of information must be tested and recorded, then analysed in relationship to other data. Sociology relies on facts gathered scientifically in order to describe, understand and predict about many social phenomena. ‘